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JAMA. 2002;288:18.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

In view of the alarmist tendency of one or two recently published papers on the falling birth rate, it is perhaps worth while to look at another aspect of the question. To some extent this has already been done in the editorial columns of THE JOURNAL; attention has been called to the unreliability of the data on which much of the pessimistic deduction has been made and to the fact that a falling birth rate and death rate were both accompaniments of thrift and easy circumstances in a population. Dr. A. L. Benedict in a recent article¹ handles the subject elaborately. He shows that a diminished birth rate depends on many factors and not all of them, or those most efficient, are necessarily immoral or objectionable. The advance in the age of matrimony during the past century is alone effective, he holds, in reducing the birth rate nearly 50 per . . . [Full Text of this Article]